December 09, 2003

Snack scones

At work we have twice a month a Friday "discussion round". Usually one of us explains his work/results while someone else brings something to eat, snacks and similar. In a certain sense one supplies food for the brain while another food for the body and that was me last week. I decided to prepare, among a couple of other things, some tiny spicy cheese and onion scones I had been wanting to try for ages. The recipe comes from The Ballymaloe Bread Book. This is a great reference book for Irish bakery. Soda bread, scones and sweet buns recipes are especially good. I'm not really happy with the recipes I've tried from the ethnic and flavoured breads sections, but those were not the chapters that pushed me to buy the book anyway.

Before I go on to describe the recipe I wanted to spend a couple of words on Ballymaloe House. This country residence is probably the most important high end B&B/restaurant in Ireland, setting the standard for other similar establishments. They also run a cookery school which is highly renowned in Ireland, having produced many of the country's top chefs. BTW if someone extremely rich who really likes my blog would like to give me a gift voucher for their 12-weeks course I'd be happy to accept... well I can try can't I? :-))). If you happen to be in Ireland this is a place that deserves to be tried. Even if you're on a tight budget, like us last summer, you could consider eating there for lunch, which has a fixed price of 30 or 35 Euro. The sweets trolley is almost worth the price on its own.

I sifted the flour, added the dry ingredients and mixed well. I rubbed in the butter, cut into small pieces, then added cheese and onions. Finally I beat the egg with the milk, added them to the dough and kneaded only as needed to get the dough together in a ball. To form the scones I just patted/rolled the dough into a rectangle, 2 cm high, brushed it with egg and sprinkled with the remaining parmesan. I then used my dough cutter to divide the rectangle into 2 cm square scones. These went into my oven, preheated at 180C/350F, for about 12 minutes.RIt was all really quick, scones take very little time.
The scones tasted good (especially with wine) but I had a few ideas for other "snack" scones with cheese that could be even better:
-blue cheese and walnut
-fresh goat cheese and herbs
-Tuscan pecorino (or Spanish sheep cheese) glazed with honey
To be continued.....

I've been going back and forth with myself wanting to buy the Ballymaloe Bread Book. My book buying budget is substantially less now with a new house and a baby on the way and I've been wondering if it was worth it or if I should just save the money and get something else.

Deb: It really depends what you're looking for. The ballymaloe book is great if you love scones and British-Irish baking. If you want something more general, and maybe a bit more bread centered there are quite a few better books. My favourite at the moment is "The bread baker's apprentice". I bought it for someone as an Xmas present but I'm really tempted to keep it :-)

if, actually when, I'll come around to experimenting with other scone-cheese recipes, I'll no doubt post about it. For the herbs and cheese ones I guess I'll have to wait spring, till then my herb plants will be in winter rest.